“The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority [MBTA] is in danger of collapsing under its own operating expenses and debt obligations, to the point that it can’t even pay for repairs that are vital to basic safety,” reports the Boston Globe. That conclusion is based on an official review of the MBTA that Governor Deval Patrick entrusted to former John Hancock CEO David D’Alessandro.

Up through the 1990s, the MBTA was funded by the state, with the agency effectively presenting a bill for its deficits to the legislature each year. Concerned that this failed to give transit officials incentives to control costs, the legislature in 1999 decided to give MBTA a fixed 20 percent share of state sales tax revenues and told it to operate out of those revenues. This was supposed to lead to reduced operating costs and greater investments in the long-term health of the system.

As the D’Alessandro report documents, this isn’t what happened. First, most costs, such as fuel, were outside of MBTA’s control. Even costs that were under MBTA’s control, such as payroll, ended up increasing far faster than planned. Meanwhile, the sales taxes that were supposed to fund MBTA’s deficits fell short of expectations. The result, over an eight-year period, was a $558 million shortfall.

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A new study published by the Cascade Policy Institute provides more evidence that the automobile is a key part of the nation’s economy. Though some may scoff that libertarian Cascade Policy is merely a part of some “right-wing conspiracy,” the study’s author, Randall Pozdena, is one Oregon’s most respected economists.

People in wealthy economies drive more; people who drive more live in wealthier economies. “What causes what?” asks Pozdena; do wealthier people drive more or does more driving make people wealthier? Based on his own research and a review of the literature, the answer, he finds, is “bidirectional causality”; that is, “VMT and the economy ’cause’ each other.”

Because of this, he concludes dryly, “policy interventions that reduce VMT will have an effect on the economy.” In particular, he means, reducing VMT will have a negative effect on the economy.

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The Census Bureau says that about 5.1 percent of commuters in the San Francisco-Oakland urban area take the Bay Area Rapid Transit to work, compared with 10 percent who ride bus or light rail and 72 percent who go by auto. So naturally, the media predicted complete chaos if BART workers went on strike, as they threatened to do yesterday.

As it happens, last-minute negotiations helped to avert the strike, possibly because union leaders realized that public sentiment was against them. Of course, we don’t yet know what final deal was reached; historically, transit agencies cave into the unions, but this time BART is feeling such a pinch that it may not have given up too much.

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Edward Glaeser, one of the nation’s leading urban economists, thinks that high-speed rail is a waste, especially when it is planned for areas such as Alabama and Oklahoma. Not only is this inefficent, he notes, “intercity rail travelers are wealthier than car travelers,” so subsidies to high-speed rail are regressive.

“The case for subsidizing urban mass transit, like the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, is certainly debatable,” says Glaeser, “but it is much stronger than the case for subsidizing rail links between non-coastal cities.” Glaeser dismisses claims that high-speed rail will promote economic growth, saying that “no serious evidence supports such claims.”
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Meanwhile, a Government Accountability Office report on Obama’s high-speed rail plan raises many of the same questions posed by the Antiplanner. Noting that the Federal Railroad Administration has no reliable estimates of costs, ridership, and benefits, the GAO questions whether it is appropriate to spend billions of dollars of stimulus funds on an unknown and untested program.